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Comment by appplemac | Hacker News Reader

tar czf - . | ssh destination "tar xz"

To pipe all the contents of your current directory (including dotfiles) to the destination machine.

Greetings from LSI-UPC!

I use that everyday, but didn't think about adding it to the list. It's on now, thanks!

PS: hey, we're neighbors! :)

I used to use this, because it's awesome that it got all the file types correct (sockets, for example).

Then I learned to love rsync -av. The benefits are many-fold.

I would change this to:

tar czf - . | ssh destination "cd /remote/dir; tar xz"

There is also tar -C /local/dir -czf - . | ssh dest "tar -C /remote/dir -xz"

You will one day punch yourself for not being safe.

    tar czf - | ssh destination 'cd /remote/dir && tar xzf -'

Test that `cd` or one day you'll end up extracting in the wrong place.

Why not rsync?

They're both useful. tar over ssh is very fast for large amounts of data. rsync is only fast if most of the data already exists.